History

Between 2002 and 2007, computer science departments across the country have shown large declines in enrollment. At the same time, CAHSI institutions have seen dramatic increases in overall undergraduate student population. While the total number of Hispanic students in computer science has declined over the past 5 years, the proportion of Hispanic students has remained stable or increased at CAHSI institutions. This is significant given the explosion over these same years of for-profit and online computer science undergraduate programs, which currently graduate a large number of Hispanic computer scientists. The potential to recruit Hispanic students into computing is great at CAHSI institutions--over 64,000 Hispanic undergraduates were enrolled in the seven schools in the fall of 2007.  In addition, extending CAHSI initiatives to reach all undergraduate computing scholars will impact over 1200 Hispanics per year. Proposed graduate student initiatives will serve over 100 Hispanics in computing per year, based on 2007 enrollment figures.

The First Three Years

In the first year, CAHSI built an effective Alliance with well-defined communication
strategies and transferred effective-practice interventions to adopting institutions.
Since CAHSI’s inception in 2005, it has established collaborations with key professional
organizations, e.g., Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans
in Science (SACNAS), Latinas in Computing (LiC), GEM Consortium, and Society of
Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), and is in the process of finalizing new
collaborations with the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF), and the EL Alliance.

We found that CAHSI institutions graduated 52%, or 178 students out of 328 total
Hispanic graduates from all public HSIs in 2005-2006, and in 2007, the seven CAHSI
computing departments graduated an additional 149 Hispanic computer science majors.
In addition, two CAHSI institutions graduated an above-average proportion of women
in computer science. When compared to other HSIs, the enrollment of Hispanic computing
students at CAHSI institutions is closer to parity with the overall enrollment of
Hispanic students at their schools. Because CAHSI institutions have formed successful
partnerships to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics
in computing, the Alliance is well poised to expand the scope of its activities
and broaden its impact. Table 1 highlights the value added by CAHSI and supporting
evidence from the last three years.

 Table 1: CAHSI Institution Undergraduate Computer Science/Computer Engineering
Enrollment

(Table taken from "CAHSI Year Three Annual Evaluation Report Recruiting, Retaining,
and Advancing Hispanics in Computing", January 30, 2009)